Member of City of London Corporation helped pitch for ‘Uzbek’ business

Edward Lord is an elected member of the City of London Corporation.

An assistant to a member of the House of Lords, who is also an elected member of the City of London Corporation, was called in by a PR firm to help pitch to Bureau journalists posing as representatives of the Uzbek government.

Edward Lord OBE, a paid researcher and assistant to Lord Kilclooney, attended a meeting between BTP Advisers and undercover Bureau journalists. He was introduced by Mark Pursey, the head of the PR firm, as ‘my partner in the business’.

Mr Lord has since explained that he is not and never has been a partner in BTP Advisers, but was there to help provide ‘added credibility’.

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Neutralising Wikipedia
However in the meeting, Mr Lord acted as if he was part of the firm, advising that there was a case for ‘neutralising’ Uzbekistan’s Wikipedia entry.

‘You don’t want to manipulate it or spin it into something it’s not. What you want to do is make sure that it’s accurate and certainly when I’ve looked at the Wikipedia entries about Uzbekistan and issues to do with Uzbekistan, someone has been writing entries that are not friendly.’ He added: ‘I think there would be a case for going through and neutralising them so they are factual, rather than giving a negative spin.’

He also stressed his work for the City of London, which involves hosting events for foreign diplomats, other dignitaries and business people.

‘My relationship with Mark is principally non-executive but there are certain specific things I would work on,’ he said. ‘If you did want to do a state or head of government visit then that’s something that I would definitely be working on.’

Fire-fighting
During both men discussed working for the government of Azerbaijan. Mr Lord himself is chair of the advisory board of the European Azerbaijan Society (TEAS), a lobby group, which also works on behalf of Azerbaijan.

Mr Lord claimed the firm had ‘quashed’ a ‘smear story’ about the treatment of gay people in Azerbaijan.

‘In relation to Azerbaijan winning the Eurovision Song Contest, there was an immediate smear story that came out saying that gay people wouldn’t be welcome in Azerbaijan – the Eurovision Song Contest has a huge gay following. It was an immediate smear attack that we managed to quash,’ he said.

Gay rights campaigners had responded to the victory, which carries with it a duty to host the contest the following year, by drawing attention to homophobia in Azerbaijan.

Mr Lord also mentioned how he dealt with criticisms of Prince Andrew’s links to the country.

‘Earlier in the year there was a thing about the relationship between Prince Andrew and the Azeri president and his family, we managed to deal with that,’ he said.

In March this year Mr Lord penned an op-ed for Prospect magazine entitled ‘It’s time to increase Britain’s engagement with Azerbaijan’. Andrew had done ‘nothing discernibly improper’, Mr Lord wrote, while attacking ‘naysayers’ who ‘continue to maintain that Britain should recoil from engagement with a country such as Azerbaijan until they meet some nebulous benchmark of European acceptability’.

He signed off as ‘a member of the City of London Corporation and Deputy Chairman of TEAS’. He wrote a letter making a similar case to the Holyrood magazine.

Mr Lord later told the Bureau he was not paid for this work. The European Azerbaijan Society does, however, pay him what he describes as a ‘small fee’ through his firm, Edward Lord Consultants.

Last week Mr Lord told the Bureau: ‘I attended the meeting as a personal favour to Mr Pursey merely to provide him with back-up and added credibility for what he believed was a legitimate potential client. With the benefit of hindsight, I should not have done so.’

Watch the highlights from the undercover meeting.